What is Pagerank?
Google uses PageRank, a numeric value to represent how important a web page is on the web. It is one of many factors used to determine which web pages appear at the top search results.
Google describes PageRank as the following.
“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”
What does PageRank Measure?
PageRank measures a web page’s importance. The most important pages on the Internet are thought as the pages with the most links leading to them. PageRank thinks of links as votes, where a page linking to another page is casting a vote. Pages with higher PageRank have more weight in “voting” with their links than pages with lower PageRank. PageRank also looks at the number of links on the page casting the “vote.” Pages with more links have less weight.
How Important Is PageRank?
PageRank is one of many factors that determines where a web page appears in search result ranking.
How to Check PageRank?
PageRank is assigned to individual web pages within a website, not the entire website and it is measured on a scale of zero to ten. Very few pages have a PageRank of 10. If you would like to check what PageRank your site has or other sites have, install Google’s Toolbar. Google has made a small green bar that starts at 0 page rank, a blank bar, all the way up to 10, a full green bar, which is 100% authoritative. It should be noted that the PageRank shown in the toolbar is an estimate released by Google, and it is only updated every 3 months or so. Sites with a PageRank 0 are either being punished by Google, or relatively new sites or just have an authority of zero.
How to Increase PageRank?
To bring a web page on the top page of Google search results, increasing PageRank is essential since it is one of the most critical factors for ranking. One of the SEO techniques is link building. Traditional SEO has a lot link building strategies and techniques. Some webmasters trade relevant links with other people, buy links that have high PageRank and submit their websites to directories with high PageRank, such as the Open Directory Project. Google promotes “back-links,” or inbound links that coming naturally. For example, your web page has high quality content and other people are linking to your website.
Internal links in your site are also very important. As you build web pages within your website, you can create some of your own back-links by linking to relevant pages within your own website. Remember too many links are bad for SEO. Do not overdo it.
The best way to increase your PageRank is to have quality content that other people want to link. Getting a high PageRank for your site should definitely be part of your longterm SEO strategy.
Thoughts and Discussion
Since search engines keep improving and the factors, which affect PageRank changes accordingly. Nowadays, most SEO experts think that PageRank can still be the deciding factor that push your site to the top of the search engines although not nearly as important as it used to be.
Since Search engines like Google only gives webmaster guidelines above, the actual search engine ranking factors are unknown. There are some SEO professionals are analyzing and testing to try to figure out those factors. Some webmasters think Search Engine Algorithm chasing is meaningless. What’s your opinion?
Do you think that the process of increasing your PageRank is directly tied to link acquisition? What do you think on getting links from other sites through link purchasing?
Related posts:
- Link Building Guidelines: Do Not Start Blindly
- How to Submit Website to Search Engines
- Search Engine Ranking Factors in 2011
- Search Engine Optimization for Beginners
